With more than 2.5 billion people projected to live in cities globally by 2050, traffic and pollution are becoming increasingly difficult challenges to overcome. One of the solutions that is rapidly gaining popularity is micromobility. It includes vehicles like electric scooters and bicycles that provide reliable short-distance transportation at a fraction of the price of operating a car and with much less impact on the environment.
Since their founding in San Francisco in 2016, Spin’s electric scooters have been a hit with students, commuters, and tourists. The scooters are affordable, have a low environmental impact, reduce the number of cars used for short trips, and are easy and fun. In the past year alone, more than 1 million Spin rides were taken across 70 cities and university campuses around the US.
In order to expand rapidly across the country, Spin needed a reliable connectivity solution that could scale as they did. A key element of their business model was the ability to remotely monitor and control scooters in real-time without requiring a centralized hub or docking station. They turned to Twilio for a solution.
Twilio connects Spin's scooters to our back-end APIs that track, lock and unlock our vehicles across all of our markets. This helps us manage and leverage huge amounts of data from around the country and has fueled our astonishing growth over the past year.
Faced with explosive demand, Spin looked to Twilio to help support critical business operations that rely upon having complete visibility of their fleet at all times. Preventing scooters from being misplaced, stolen, or lost is essential to controlling costs, managing fleet readiness to meet demand, and remaining good partners with the cities and campuses Spin serves.
Twilio had the solution to Spin’s connectivity challenges. Twilio provided a single SIM with unparalleled uptime and expansive network coverage to give Spin the fleet visibility they needed. With Twilio, Spin can remotely monitor and control thousands of scooters regardless of where they are traveling or where they are parked. Twilio IoT enables a powerful customer experience as a Spin rider can easily locate, rent, unlock, and ride a scooter within seconds—all from their smartphone.
Twilio continues to fuel Spin’s growth with a pay-as-you-go pricing model and simple online ordering of Twilio SIMs. Twilio’s partnership has saved Spin time and resources that would have been needed to negotiate and implement a patchwork of multiple solutions from multiple providers.
As Spin continues to meet the demand for shared micro mobility solutions, the cities and campuses they serve have initiated a variety of reporting requirements for operators of scooter fleets. Twilio helps Spin collect and manage the data needed to meet those requirements and comply with local regulations.